Newswise — Old Westbury, N.Y – With the destruction of Hurricane Sandy still visible throughout Long Island, New York Institute of Technology’s eighth annual energy conference will bring together experts in energy storage, emergency services, and resilient infrastructure. The conference, “Preparing for Climate Change,” will be held Thursday, June 13 from 8:30 am to 3:30 pm at NYIT de Seversky Mansion. “After last year’s floods and power loss, people want to know how to avoid a repeat of the loss, damage, and hardship they experienced,” said Associate Professor Sarah Meyland, J.D., one of the conference organizers. “This energy conference discusses how to be prepared for the next time and what the next time might be like.” School of Engineering and Computing Sciences Dean Nada Marie Anid, Ph.D., will open the conference. Louis Uccellini, Ph.D., a Bethpage native and now director of the National Weather Service, will deliver the keynote address on extreme weather. Cynthia Rosenzweig, Ph.D., of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science, is the featured speaker on climate change. Disaster Anthropologist Susanna Hoffman, Ph.D., will focus her remarks on the cultural context of disasters. “With climate change, things like Hurricane Sandy are not a once-in-a-lifetime experience anymore,” said Meyland. “Are we going to see this every five years, every ten years?” The conference also features three panels dedicated to specific aspects of emergency preparations. The first panel, “Energy Storage and Production,” includes presentations by David Droz of Urban Green Energy, William Acker of NY Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium, and Rahul Walawalkar of Customized Energy Solutions. Options for energy storage as well as new trends in the field will be discussed. Storm-resilient critical infrastructure is the subject of the second panel, featuring Rae Zimmerman of NYU’s Institute for Civil Infrastructure and Doug Melzer, of the City of Long Beach Medical Center. That facility suffered severe damage during Hurricane Sandy but is expected to reopen its emergency department and some of its hospital beds within the next few weeks. The third panel, “Powering and Operating Emergency Service,” features Rosy Lum of TransmissionHub. Lum's presentation, will focus on power grid strengthening options and the challenges to those measures. Attendees are eligible for five hours of Continuing Education Credits applicable to re-registration as a professional engineer or registered architect.

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New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) offers 90 degree programs, including undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees, in more than 50 fields of study, including architecture and design; arts and sciences; education; engineering and computing sciences; health professions; management; and osteopathic medicine. A non-profit independent, private institution of higher education, NYIT has 14,000 students attending campuses on Long Island and Manhattan, online, and at its global campuses. NYIT sponsors 11 NCAA Division II programs and one Division I team.

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